Patron of the Arts

They had to be assassins, for any tourist would simply drive right up and climb out. A nuvomartian might not even stop.

Here I go again, I thought angrily.

They couldn’t be absolutely certain I was in the Palace and perhaps they might not find me. Hiding in an already scoured lair was better than running, I thought, and watched them come over the dune cautiously. There were two of them and they kept well apart. I tracked one with my gun, but the light was too uncertain for me to risk a shot, and he was moving deceptively, running, crawling, walking, stopping suddenly.

I decided to go back into my former hideout deep in the bowels of the great structure. I moved as quickly and as silently as I could, but this time I had no light, and I kept bumping into sharp corners. I banged my head painfully on a stalactite and barely stifled my curse. I moved on, often stumbling, until I saw below me the brilliant rainbow flashes as two lights scanned a crystal cavern below me.

The lights, moving and reflecting, confused me even further, for now they were the only illumination. The light shifted colors several times a second, bouncing and receding, growing bright and passing through the spectrum as it came up through the layers and rooms and colored crystals.

I stopped and did not move at all, except to breathe and listen. My gun was at my side and I tried to blend with the forest of stalagmites among which I was standing. The two lights below me parted and one grew dim while the other grew brighter and closer.

The light was in my eyes, reflected from a hundred surfaces, coming in at different angles, making multiple shadows, confusing my aim. I fired first, and there was the brittle collapse of an armload of crystals. He fired, but the mirror surfaces of the stalagmite near me reflected most of the beam. It was hot, though; the heat seared my hand and face. I shot again, as close to panic as I had ever gotten, but I don’t know if I was even close. I was firing into the hundred lights, but he had me in his sights.

There was a sudden wire-hot lance through my thigh, like a thrust sword, and I gasped with pain. I fired as my leg collapsed, and I held down the trigger. The shattering of a thousand crystals was mixed with the hoarse scream of a man, and my gun melted. I dropped it from my seared hand as I fell forward. My shoulder hit something hard and my body flipped to fall heavily onto stalagmites like knives. I felt blinding pain.

My fingers probed for my thigh, and I found it wet with blood, a great raw wound. I realized my leg must be almost severed, the image of the assassin lying in his pool of blood flashed into my mind. I felt the rest of my body and found it covered with burns and cuts from the crystals. The nameless man buried beneath the fallen crystal had killed me. I inched forward, amazed that I could even think against the pain. There was still one more killer, but my gun was useless. I tried finding the dead man’s gun by feel, but couldn’t. The light was buried, too, shining out through the beautiful rubble. I dug for it and turned it off. I almost fainted from the effort, and when the world swam back to me I knew I had to get away from there.

I tried to tear a tourniquet from my jumper, but the material was too tough for my weak hands, and slippery with blood. I dug at the huge Martian jewels covering the killer’s body, using the light to find his laser. With pain- blurry eyes I examined it and found the charge almost exhausted. I thumbed it to the lowest setting and fanned the beam. Then I took a deep breath and fired a long burst across my great wound. My scream sounded down through the crystal caverns, echoing and reechoing grotesquely. I lay panting with exhaustion, the laser fallen from my hand, depleted. But my leg was almost cauterized. Maybe I wouldn’t bleed to death right away.

It might take an hour.

I started crawling. I wasn’t crawling anywhere but away. I hoped I would leave a blood trail too faint or too confused by the intricate crystal patterns for the other man to track.

I knew I was dead, but the animal in me kept me going.

I stared down through the floor at involved complexes that could be crystalline structures the size of my hand, or something as big as a transporter and far away. Reality was sharp and painful beneath my torn hands and knees, but at the same time it was floating, shifting, changing, a mind-stream going through the rapids, a blurring and melting of pain and reality and alien fantasy.

Death was ahead of me in time. Death was behind me, clutching a laser. Death dribbled out behind me, in blotches and blobs. I carried it like a mountainous rock. I wanted to lie down and quit, but something kept me moving. I stopped feeling the pain of ripped palms and gashed knees. There was only the now of doom and extinction. I collapsed several times; each time I passed out and awoke knowing, somehow, that it was only a few seconds. I swam through the pain until it was a part of me, a necessary skin and dagger point that covered me.

My hands pulled me through the sands when my legs gave out, and I dragged myself like a broken toy that doesn’t know when to quit. I went over a hump of sand in the dark and slid down the other side, filling my mouth with gritty clog. I spat it out and pulled myself on. The light was gone, somewhere, but I seemed to move through a faint mist of light. The red stone walls grated against this shoulder, then that, and I broke the side of my face in a drunken lurch. Sand?

I stopped and fell against the stone and my bloody fingers touched the wall in the dark. I must be somehow in the old part, the deepest part, where the mural was. Maybe I would be safe there. I forced myself onward until I could go no farther. I lay there against a dune, my mind a sluggish pool of sludge, thinking, So this is how it is to die. My tortured body told me it might have been easier to go with a surgical clean laser cut through the torso.